New Book | India: A Story through 100 Objects
From ACC Art Books:
Vidya Dehejia, India: A Story Through 100 Objects (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2021), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-8194969174, $40.
We are constantly surrounded by objects, by ‘things’ that channel and dictate our everyday life, ‘things’ that we take for granted. But these objects speak to us, and speak about us. They have a story to tell that reflects our values and aspirations, our achievements and dreams, and reveal more about us than we realize! This richly illustrated book focuses on 100 objects to tell a story of India that unravels in a series of thematic sections that allow the objects to take center-stage. The stories that some objects tell will be new to readers; at other times, the objects themselves may be familiar but the story they tell may not be obvious. The 100 objects shed light on the varying priorities and the differing strands of achievement that arose over time to create the rich multi-cultural medley that is today’s India.
Vidya Dehejia is the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University in New York, and the recipient of a Padma Bhushan conferred on her by the President of India in 2012 for achievement in Art and Education. Over the past 40 years, she has combined research with teaching and exhibition-related activities around the world. Her work has ranged from Buddhist art of the centuries BCE to the esoteric temples of North India, and from the sacred bronzes of South India to art under the British Raj. This comprehensive scope is evident from her books: The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855–1280 to Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India; from The Unfinished: Stone Carvers at Work on the Indian Subcontinent to The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries between Sacred and Profane in India’s Art; and from Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj to Devi, The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art. Management and curatorial experience at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington DC, combined with her interest and pleasure in teaching first-year undergraduates, provided her with a broad mandate to convey the excitement of her field to non-specialist audiences. India: A Story through 100 Objects is a result of this priority.
C O N T E N T S
What’s in a Name
Into History
Idealized Body, Human and Divine
Urge to Adorn
Inter-Cultural Encounters
Written Word
Scientific Insights
Rise of Temple Culture
Kingship and Courtly Culture
Indian Ocean Networks
Art of the Illustrated Book
Art of Contest
Connoisseurship, Luxury, and Brilliance
Mobility and Cosmopolitanism
Sensorium
Mappling Place and Space
India through British Eyes
Deshi Expressions, Deep Traditions
Ideals of Womanhood
Early Twentieth Century
Into the Present
Further Reading
New Book | India: A History in Objects
From The British Museum and Thames & Hudson:
T. Richard Blurton, India: A History in Objects (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0500480649, £30 / $45.
An authoritative visual history of India, one of the world’s oldest and most vibrant cultures, drawing on South Asian art and artifacts from prehistory to the present.
India: A History in Objects presents a beautiful collection of material culture from South Asia and traces its history through a huge variety of art and artifacts, both religious and secular.
Arranged chronologically, and abundantly illustrated with expertly selected objects, this superb new overview connects today’s South Asia with its past. Early chapters describe prehistoric objects from 1.5 million years ago, examine artifacts from the Indus Civilization, and follow the emergence of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity. The collection outlines the rise of the Mughals, the greatest Muslim dynasty of India, who made India a leading economic power. The distinct Mughal style is traced through paintings, architecture, hardstone carving, metalwork, and jewelry. This volume also explores the early trade industry to Europe via examples of spice pots, textiles, and other luxury goods. Finally, modernism and political independence in the 20th century are examined through Indian culture such as popular prints, contemporary photography, and the performing arts.
This volume presents a vast panoply, from the urban splendor of dynastic empires to the rural life of the subcontinent. A compelling visual history of rich and diverse cultures, this book will inspire and inform anyone interested in India and material culture.
T. Richard Blurton was the Head of the South and Southeast Asia section at the British Museum. Trained as an archaeologist, he has worked all over South Asia. His publications include Krishna in the Garden of Assam, Bengali Myths, and Hindu Art.
Exhibition | A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur
Sunrise in Udaipur, ca. 1722–23, detail (Udaipur: The City Palace Museum, The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, 2012.20.0015).
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From the press release (29 August) for the exhibition:
A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur
Sackler Gallery, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC, 19 November 2022 — 14 May 2023
Cleveland Museum of Art, 11 June — 10 September 2023
Curated by Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera
The National Museum of Asian Art, in collaboration with The City Palace Museum in Udaipur, presents A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, an exhibition that brings together 63 works on paper, cotton, and scrolls from collections across the world to reveal how artists sought to convey the sensory and lived experience of the lake city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Many of the paintings have never been publicly exhibited or published. Curated by Debra Diamond (Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South Asian and Southeast Asian Art at the National Museum of Asian Art) and Dipti Khera (associate professor at New York University), A Splendid Land will be on view in the museum’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. It is the first in a series of exhibitions that celebrate the National Museum of Asian Art’s centennial in 2023.
In the 18th century, the artists of Udaipur shifted their focus from small poetic manuscripts to large-scale paintings of the city’s palaces, lakes, mountains, and seasons. They sought to convey the bhava, the emotional tenor and sensorial experiences, that make places and times memorable. This was unlike anything else in Indian art. The paintings express themes of belonging and prosperous futures that are universal. A Splendid Land explores the environmental, political, and emotional contexts in which the new genre emerged. Udaipur’s economy depended on annual monsoons, extensive water harvesting, and securing the loyalty of nobles and allies. By celebrating regional abundance and courtly refinement, the paintings strengthened friendships in the changing political landscapes of early modern South Asia.
“The National Museum of Asian Art has a rich history of connecting visitors with South Asian arts and cultures,” said Chase Robinson, Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. “Built upon a long-standing collaboration with Indian colleagues, the exhibition will allow the museum to bring extraordinary but little-known pieces to a global audience, enriching its understanding of a fascinating moment in India’s past.”
The National Museum of Asian Art has more than 1,200 objects in its South Asian collections. Sculpture, paintings, and manuscripts illuminate the subcontinent’s many religious and courtly traditions; photography is at the center of the contemporary Indian holdings. A Splendid Land includes 13 paintings from the National Museum of Asian Art; paintings from Udaipur are a strength of the collection.
The artworks featured in the exhibition reveal how painters developed a new genre centered upon the lived experience of local landscapes, lake systems, and palaces. The atelier became an incubator; over some 200 years, artists found ever-new ways to evoke ambience, trigger memories, and create feelings of connection. This departure in subject matter differs from the body-focused visual traditions of Indian art over two millennia. A Splendid Land is the first exhibition to examine closely this shift and how it expands people’s understanding of emotions and sensorial experience, as well as climate and natural resource management, in early modern India.
A Splendid Land is organized as a journey that begins at Udaipur’s center and continues outward: first the lakes and lake palaces, then to the city, the countryside, and finally to the cosmos. An ambient soundscape by the renowned experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta (b. 1977, Jammu, India) underscores the sensorial elements in the paintings, inviting contemporary audiences to sense—and not just see—the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings. The installation will include 51 works on paper (roughly 3 feet by 4 feet), five monumental works on cotton (ranging in height from 5 feet to 10 feet), one scroll (9 feet in length) from the 17th through 19th centuries, and six photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries.
“The exhibition structure directly responds to the visuality of the paintings and the historical goals of the artists,” said Diamond, who is a specialist in Indian court painting. “Each gallery centers upon the emotions engendered by a particular place or season. The sequence of immersive moods will heighten the sensorial experience of place for museum visitors. I am grateful to the City Palace Museum for their partnership on this exciting project that allows our visitors to get a sense of Udaipur and its cultural heritage, and to co-curator Dipti Khera, whose groundbreaking work on historical emotions is central to the exhibition.”
Debra Diamond has curated numerous exhibitions with the National Museum of Asian Art, including Garden & Cosmos (2008–09), Yoga: The Art of Transformation (2013–14), and Body Image: Arts from the Indian Subcontinent, currently on view in the museum’s Freer Gallery of Art. Dipti Khera, associate professor in New York University’s Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, has published extensively, foregrounding art that challenges colonial perspectives and global histories of the 18th and 19th centuries.
A Splendid Land will be accompanied by a robust program of public events, most notably a public symposium on the monsoon, past and present, and the ways that art reveals cultural attitudes towards natural resources and speaks to climate crises in South Asia that will bring perspectives of the past together with insights of the future. Additionally, the traditional Rajasthani music band Raitila Rajasthan will present Music of Splendid Land, featuring songs inspired from themes of Udaipur paintings showcased at the exhibition.
A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur is organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in collaboration with The City Palace Museum, Udaipur administered by The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation.
Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera, eds., A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2022), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-3777439440, $60.
Research Lunch Series at the Mellon Centre, Autumn 2022
Selected sessions from this fall’s Research Lunch Series at PMC:
Hans Hönes | Art History in Britain: A Scottish Innovation
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 7 October 2022, 1pm
It is widely assumed that art history made a somewhat belated entry into British academia. The foundation of the Courtauld Institute (1932) and the arrival of the exiled Warburg Institute (1933) have played a pioneering role in the establishment of degree-level teaching of the subject. While such statements are not wrong, they are certainly not the whole story. This paper discusses a range of initiatives to introduce academic art history teaching between ca. 1860 and 1930, focusing in particular on developments at Scottish Universities—Edinburgh, Aberdeen, St Andrews, and Glasgow. At Edinburgh and Aberdeen, the history of art was offered at degree-level as part of the Master of Arts (‘Ordinary’) degree; in the 1920s, Aberdeen even offered a Diploma in ‘Fine Art’. At St Andrews, art historical lectures formed part of the curriculum of disciplines such as classics. I will argue that art history in Britain first gained an institutional footing north of the border, and that this was facilitated by the specificities of Scottish Higher Education. By analysing developments in Scottish higher education I hope to redress a geographical imbalance that permeates much art historiographical writing—the result of a certain southern bias. Book tickets»
Hans C. Hönes is a Lecturer in Art History at Aberdeen University. In 2021–22, he held the Paul Mellon Centre’s Research Collections Fellowship, with a project on British art historiography in the post-war period. He has worked extensively on the history of art history and art theory since the eighteenth century, and has written and edited books on Heinrich Wölfflin (2011), eighteenth-century antiquarianism (2014), Aby Warburg (2015), and art history and migration (2019), as well as publishing articles in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, Architectural History, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. He has just completed his third monograph, a new biography of Aby Warburg (forthcoming with Reaktion Books).
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Jake Subryan Richards | Anglo-Dutch Empire and Visual Culture in the Atlantic World
Paul Mellon Centre, 28 October 2022, 1pm
Theodorus Netscher, Pineapple Grown in Sir Matthew Decker’s Garden, 1720, oil on canvas, 85 x 95 cm (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum).
This talk explores the hidden connections between the British and Dutch Empires as revealed by several paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through formal and contextual analysis, the talk will investigate how artists have established and challenged visual norms related to Atlantic slavery and freedom. Book tickets»
Jake Subryan Richards is a member of the British Art Network’s Emerging Curators Group and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. Between 2020 and 2024, he is the external curator of a project to investigate how the collections of the University of Cambridge Museums are connected to Atlantic enslavement and empire. Richards’ interests span Dutch and British fine art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the art of the African diaspora over the past five hundred years. Richards has published research in Past and Present and Comparative Studies in Society and History. His article on anti-slave-trade law won the 2019 Alexander Prize, and his PhD thesis was co-winner of the 2021 Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal. He is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
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Dean Hawkes | Architecture and the Climate of England
Paul Mellon Centre, 25 November 2022, 1pm
The first chapter of Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art (1956) is entitled ‘The Geography of Art’. In this Pevsner examined the influence of climate on national character and, by extension, on the art of a nation, concluding that there is, “a whole string of facts from art and literature tentatively derived from climate.” This is a question that I have explored in relation to the history of architecture, in my research in the last decade or so. In this work I have tried to show how the nature of this climate, defined by meteorologists as ‘temperate maritime’, may be represented and interpreted through the study of historic buildings and that the relationship of architecture and climate is as much a question of history and culture as it is of science and technology.
The background to the talk will be established by a brief outline of the architecture-climate relationship in England from the early modern period to the present. This will be followed by a presentation of material from recent in-depth research carried out at the sixteenth-century Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, where a full annual cycle (2018–19) of environmental data was collected in five of the major apartments. This research, undertaken in collaboration with Dr Ranald Lawrence of the University of Liverpool, combines the methods of building science and architectural history, providing a basis from which to construct a new description of the environment in the house as it was experienced in the first years of its inhabitation at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the midst of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’. Book tickets»
Dean Hawkes has been a teacher, researcher and practitioner of architecture for over half a century. For thirty years he taught and researched in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge and, between 1995 and 2002, was Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University. Following his retirement he returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of Darwin College, where he continues to research and teach. He has held visiting professorships at schools of architecture in Glasgow, Hong Kong, Huddersfield, Leicester, and Singapore. His research is concerned with the relationship of architecture and the environment, with particular emphasis on the evolution of this connection in the history of architecture. This theme has been explored in a sequence of books: The Environmental Tradition (1996), The Selective Environment (2002), The Environmental Imagination (1st ed. 2008, 2nd ed. 2018), and Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture (2012), and in numerous papers. In 2010 he received the RIBA Annie Spink Award for excellence in architectural education.
Research Seminar | Greg Smith on Girtin and the Artist Catalogue
Thomas Girtin, Appledore, from Instow Sands, ca. 1800, graphite and watercolour on laid paper, 25 × 47 cm
(London: The Courtauld, D.1952.RW.846)
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From PMC:
Greg Smith | Rethinking the Artist Catalogue for the Online Age: Thomas Girtin (1775–1802)
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 5 October 2022, 6pm
This lecture relates to the publication Thomas Girtin (1775–1802): An Online Catalogue, Archive, and Introduction to the Artist, due to be released on 4 October.
I will begin by outlining the scope of the project and my thinking behind the site’s tri-partite structure and title: An Online Catalogue, Archive, and Introduction to the Artist. Particular attention will be paid to two challenges: how to make a free-to-access site straightforward to use for a non-specialist audience; and then, how best to ensure the future of the site as an academic resource that can develop through the incorporation of new material and research. I will then move on to consider the different sections of the site, beginning with the approximately 1550 catalogue entries that form its core. Emphasis will be placed on the features that distinguish the site from a conventionally published catalogue and why it is that I have studiously avoided using the term catalogue raisonné. I will then look at each of the sections of the Archive, focusing first on the challenge of relating the material to the rest of the site, and then summarising their current status in relation to my ambition to produce a comprehensive if not definitive record of sales, exhibitions and publications, together with extensive transcriptions of all the early biographical accounts and related manuscript material. I will conclude my introduction to the site by looking at some of its inevitable limitations, not least as a challenge to my audience to use it as a resource for the investigation of themes beyond the project’s scope. Book tickets»
Greg Smith is an independent art historian, who has published extensively on the history of British watercolours and watercolourists, as well as landscape artists working in Italy. He has also worked as a curator at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, the Design Museum, London, and the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham, and has organised exhibitions on the work of Thomas Girtin (Tate Britain), Thomas Jones (National Gallery of Wales), and Thomas Fearnley (Barber Institute of Fine Art). As Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Greg Smith is developing a major online project: Thomas Girtin (1775–1802): An Online Catalogue, Archive and Introduction to the Artist.
New Book | Dinner with Joseph Johnson
Marking Banned Books Week (18–24 September 2022), with an 18th-century reminder of publishing’s power. From Princeton UP (the British cover is, I think, more exciting –CH).
Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 536 pages, ISBN: 978-0691243962, $40.
Once a week, in late eighteenth-century London, writers of contrasting politics and personalities gathered around a dining table. The veal and boiled vegetables may have been unappetising, but the company was convivial and the conversation brilliant and unpredictable. The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller: a man at the heart of literary life. In this book, Daisy Hay paints a remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age through the connected stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today.
Johnson’s years as a publisher, 1760 to 1809, witnessed profound political, social, cultural, and religious changes—from the American and French revolutions to birth of the Romantic age—and many of his dinner guests and authors were at the center of events. The shifting constellation of extraordinary people at Johnson’s table included William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, the scientist Joseph Priestly, and the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, as well as a group of extraordinary women—Mary Wollstonecraft, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and the poet Anna Barbauld. These figures pioneered revolutions in science and medicine, proclaimed the rights of women and children, and charted the evolution of Britain’s relationship with America and Europe. As external forces conspired to silence their voices, Johnson made them heard by continuing to publish them, just as his table gave them refuge.
A rich work of biography and cultural history, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an entertaining and enlightening story of a group of people who left an indelible mark on the modern age.
Daisy Hay is an award-winning biographer whose previous books include Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives and Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance. She is associate professor of English literature and life writing at the University of Exeter.
Symposium | Close Encounters: The Low Countries and Britain
Left: Gerrit van Honthorst, King Charles I, 1628 (London: National Portrait Gallery). Right: Jacob Jordaens, A Maidservant with a Basket of Fruit and Two Lovers, 1629–35 (Glasgow: Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum).
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From CODART:
Close Encounters: Cross-Cultural Exchange between the Low Countries and Britain, 1500–1800
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, 22–23 September 2022
On 22 and 23 September 2022, a symposium will be held at the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History on the occasion of the launch of the richly annotated and illustrated digital English version of Horst Gerson’s chapter on Britain from his Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts of 1942 (Dispersal and Legacy of Dutch Painting of the 17th Century). The event is jointly organized by the RKD and the embassy of the UK in the Netherlands, University of Amsterdam and Courtauld Institute of Art.
Before 1942, the study of Dutch art and artists in Britain was largely uncharted territory. In the last thirty years, research on early modern artists migration and cultural exchange between the Low Countries and Great Britain has progressed rapidly and in various directions. In particular, the Dutch and Flemish artists community in London and the careers of individual artists at the English and Scottish courts have received attention. The same goes for the collection history of Netherlandish art in the UK. The launch of the annotated and translated version of Gerson’s text marks the perfect occasion to rethink, discuss, and contextualize his original findings with current knowledge.
At the symposium Close Encounters, international experts from the UK, the United States, Germany, and The Netherlands will present a range of papers that will draw attention to different aspects of this cultural exchange: artists’ and dealers’ travels and routes, artist’s education, networks, patronage, as well as styles and its implications for connoisseurship. Tickets are available through the RKD website: €30 (€15 students).
Program Committee
• Rieke van Leeuwen (RKD)
• Angela Jager (RKD)
• Karen Hearn (Honorary Professor, University College London)
• Sander Karst (University of Amsterdam)
• David Taylor (Independent, previously National Trust and National Galleries Schotland)
• Joanna Woodall (Courtauld Institute of Art)
T H U R S D A Y , 2 2 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2
9.45 Registration and Coffee
10.30 Welcome and Introduction
• Chris Stolwijk (General Director RKD) — Welcome
• Lucy Ferguson (Deputy Ambassador of the UK in the Netherlands) — Welcome
• Rieke van Leeuwen — Introduction to the Program
11.00 Session 1: Cross-Cultural Networks and Collaboration
Chairs: Sander Karst and David Taylor
• Adam White — Nicholas Stone the Elder (c. 1587–1647) and His Circle: Anglo-Netherlandish Inter-Action in Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting
• Imogen Tedbury — The Van de Velde Studio at the Queen’s House
• Ada De Wit — Woodcarvers and Their Anglo-Netherlandish Network: Grinling Gibbons and Laurens van der Meulen
12.30 Lunch Break
13.30 Session 2: Thinking Differently about Cross-Cultural Exchange
Chairs: Karen Hearn and Joanna Woodall
• Gary Alabone — Leatherwork and Kwab: Influences between English and Netherlandish Picture Frames
• Flash Talk: Eleanor Stephenson — Copying the Cartouche: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Dutch and English Cartography, 1658–1675
• Amy Lim — John van Collema: A Dutch India Merchant in London
• Ulrike Kern — Dutch Art Terminology in the British Workshop
15.15 Coffee and Tea Break
15.45 Session 3: 17th-Century Netherlandish Painters and Their Relations to British Patrons
Chairs: Angela Jager and Joanna Woodall
• Michele Fredericksen — Between Two Courts: Gerrit van Honthorst and Stuart Patrons in London and The Hague
• Flash Talk: Rebekka Hoummady — A Kings Daughter in Exile: Diplomatic and Artistical Mediation between the Courts of Elizabeth Stuart and Charles I by Gerrit van Honthorst
• John Loughman — Samuel van Hoogstraten’s English Patrons
Launch of Gerson Digital: Britain
• Karen Hearn and Rieke van Leeuwen — Gerson Digital: UK, the Project
Panel Discussion
F R I D A Y , 2 3 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2
9.30 Registration and Coffee
10.00 Session 4: Collecting and Art Trade
Chairs: Angela Jager and David Taylor
• Ellinoor Bergvelt and Helen Hillyard — Dutch Paintings for Everyone! A Study of the Cartwright Collection at Dulwich Picture Gallery
• Sander Karst — Migration and Adaptation: Netherlandish Artists and the Art Market in Late 17th-Century Britain
• Tico Seiffert — Collecting Rembrandt’s Art in Britain before 1700
• Kate Heard — George IV (1762–1830) as a Collector of Dutch and Flemish Prints and Drawings
• Quentin Buvelot — British Connections in the Collection of the Mauritshuis
12.30 Lunch Break Opportunity to visit the Mauritshuis
14.30 Session 5: Legacy of the Dutch Golden Age
Chairs: Karen Hearn and Rieke van Leeuwen
• Remmelt Daalder — ‘Whom no Age has equalll’d in Ship-painting’, Willem van de Velde: World Famous in 18th-Century England
• Rica Jones — Untangling the Tangled Evidence of Jan Griffier the Elder’s Descendants and a Note on Their Legacy in British Painting
• Rebecca Welkens — Thomas Worlidge, His Approach to Rembrandt’s Prints, and the Construction of Concepts of Fame in England in the 18th Century
• Flash Talk: Quirine van de Meer Mohr — In the Wake of the Old Masters: The Migration of Dutch Modern Artists in Early 19th-Century Britain
16.30 Drinks Reception
Exhibition | Horace Walpole and Philanthropy
Now on view at The Walpole Library, with a rich and engaging online component:
‘Knight Errant of the Distressed’: Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century London
The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 11 May — 22 December 2022
Curated by Andrew Rudd
‘Knight Errant of the Distressed’: Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century London uses images, manuscripts, artefacts, and extracts from publications and correspondence to situate Walpole within the burgeoning philanthropic culture of his age. It reveals Walpole’s secret giving to prisoners and other good causes and examine the principles which underlay his philanthropy. A main aim of the exhibition is to stimulate discussion about philanthropy today.
Horace Walpole (1717–1797) lived in an age that prided itself on the extent of its philanthropy. His friend Hannah More described the era as the “age of benevolence.” Yet while Walpole was familiar with many leading philanthropists, he is not known as a supporter of good causes himself; indeed, after his death, he was accused of being uncharitable and even blamed for the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton, who had sought Walpole’s financial assistance in vain.
This exhibition seeks to situate Walpole in the context of eighteenth-century British philanthropy. An array of philanthropic organizations, fundraising initiatives, and ad hoc giving formed part of everyday life in Britain under the reigns of George II and III. The rich were expected to support the poor and needy in order to supplement the overstretched parish-based welfare system. Walpole frequently dispatched anonymous donations to victims of misfortune he read about in his daily newspaper.
Walpole was drawn personally toward outlandish cases, and this exhibition portrays his active involvement in several high-profile campaigns, including the ill-fated encounter with Chatterton. Walpole could be disparaging in his remarks about philanthropy, but visitors are encouraged to weigh his private generosity. Walpole regarded philanthropy as a means to cultivate the curious and eccentric, a discernibly queer philanthropic vision in which he himself played the role of “knight errant of the distressed.”
Andrew Rudd, of the University of Exeter, researches and teaches British literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. His monograph, Sympathy and India in British Literature 1770–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan), was published in 2011, and he is currently writing a cultural history of charity in the eighteenth century. He has held numerous fellowships (most recently at Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library and the School of Advanced Studies in English, University of Jadavpur) and speaks regularly at conferences, seminars, and public events. Since 2015, he has been a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College.
In addition to the online exhibition, a 24-page exhibition brochure by Dr. Rudd is available for download.
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Andrew Rudd | Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century England
Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Tuesday, 20 September 2022, 7.00pm
In partnership with the Farmington Libraries, Dr. Rudd will explore the rich and exciting world of philanthropy in eighteenth-century England. The talk will focus on the collector and man of letters Horace Walpole (1717–1797), who was a generous, if sometimes eccentric, supporter of the era’s good causes. Walpole’s giving habits illuminate a thriving culture of charitable relief which still finds echoes in philanthropy today.
Registration is available here»
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The Charitable Impulse: Philanthropic Values from the Eighteenth Century to Today
Dwight Hall at Yale, Wednesday, 21 September 2022, 4.00–6.00pm
A conversation jointly organized by The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University and Dwight Hall at Yale: Center for Public Service and Social Justice
In the eighteenth century, charitable acts and societies in England and the American colonies were motivated by an understanding of moral and ethical obligations of the ‘better off’ to do good works on behalf of the ‘needy’. Philanthropic organizations from this time reveal historical attitudes toward the benefit to the individual and the public of charitable activities. This panel will explore how views on privilege, agency, status, and the responsibilities of members of society to others have evolved over time, and the ways in which certain implicit understandings of why and how people should care for others remain unchanged.
Online Seminar | What Does It Mean to Curate a Historic House?
Kingston Lacy, Dorset, designed by Sir Roger Pratt, ca. 1663–65.
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From Eventbrite:
What Does It Mean to Curate a Historic House?
Online, Monday, 26 September 2022, 11.00–12.00 BST
This session will combine a short film and panel discussion based on a British Academy-funded research project led by Dr Tarnya Cooper and Dr Oliver Cox, which explores the contemporary issues and challenges with curating a historic house owned by a heritage organisation. The short film, shot at Kingston Lacy in the summer of 2022, explores the role of the curator in a publicly-accessible historic house, discussing how to prioritise sharing what is significant rather than what is left. Following the film, Cox and Cooper will convene a panel discussion featuring leading specialists from across Europe to discuss the future for historic house curation and interpretation.
Chairs
• Oliver Cox (Head of Academic Partnerships, V&A)
• Tarnya Cooper (Curatorial and Collections Director, National Trust)
Panellists
• Sarah McLeod (Chief Executive, Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust)
• Jeffrey Haworth (Historian and former National Trust Curator)
• Alice Loxton (History Hit)
• John Orna-Ornstein (Director of Curation and Experience, National Trust)
This event is delivered by The National Trust as part of the Art History Festival (20–26 September 2022), presented by the Association for Art History. The full Festival programme is available here»
Print Quarterly, September 2022
The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 39.3 (September 2022)
Anonymous artist after Sébastien Leclerc, View of the Hall of Mirrors, ca. 1684, pen and brown ink, brown wash on paper, 13.6 × 9.1 cm (Musée National des Châteaux du Versailles, INV.DESS 1247).
Tomáš Valeš, “Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Jakob Matthias Schmutzer and the Allegory on the Edict of Toleration, 1785”
This article discusses new insights into the painter Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724–1796) and the creation of his print, the Allegory on the Edict of Toleration (1785). It adduces two letters from the engraver Jakob Mattias Schmutzer (1733–1811), his collaborator since the 1750s and later his father-in-law. The article discusses the strategies used for the print’s distribution and also presents an analysis of the print’s preparatory drawing and three proof impressions.
Antoine Gallay, “Sébastien Leclerc’s Preparatory Drawing for the View of the Hall of Mirrors (1684): A Reassessment”
This short article re-examines the status of a drawing acquired by the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon in 2008, traditionally attributed to Sébastien Leclerc and thought to have been made in preparation for his famous print of the View of the Hall of Mirror (1684). The author also presents a second little known drawing which was most certainly made by Leclerc himself in preparation for the print. Comparison between this drawing and the print offers new insight on the early appearance of the Hall of Mirrors and on Leclerc’s artistic conception and practices.
The issue also includes these relevant notes and reviews:
Battle Engravings for the Emperors of China
Jean Michel Massing, Review of Henriette Lavaulx-Vrécourt, Niklas Leverenz and Alexey Pastukhov, Berlin Battle Engravings: 34 Copperplates for the Emperors of China / Berliner Schlachtenkupfer: 34 Druckplatten der Kaiser von China (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021), p. 305.
Thomas Gainsborough in London
Anne Lyles, Review of Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in London (London: Modern Art Press, 2021), p. 307.
Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty
Adam Haliburton, Review of Julie Nelson Davis, Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (London: Reaktion Books, 2021), p. 308.
The Waterloo Map of Pierre-Jacques Goetghebuer
Inge Misschaert has contributed a brief analysis of the much-copied Map of the Battle of Waterloo (1815) by Belgian architect and engraver Pierre-Jacques Goetghebuer. The article elaborates on the production history of Goetghebuer’s map and its context alongside other adventurous competitors seeking to illustrate the famous battle in its immediate aftermath.
The Reception of Raphael
Carlo Schmid, Review of Andres Stolzenburg and David Klemm, eds., Raffael: Wirkung eines Genies (Petersberg: Hamburger Kunsthalle and Michael Imhof Verlag, 2021), p. 315.
The review focuses on the cult of Raphael which took off at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The Fruitful Encounter Between Engraving and Photography
Francesca Maria Bonetti, Review of Nicolas Devigne and Virginie Caudron, eds., Contacts – Photographie – Gravure: Jeux et Enjeux (Aire-sur-la-Lys: ateliergaleriéditions and éditions Musée de Gravelines, 2020), p. 318.
Bonetti discusses the different photomechanical processes based on proto-photographic experiments carried out between 1824 and 1827 and known as heliography.
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